Inequality is growing, democracy is under threat, catastrophic climate change looms, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed massive inequality in everything from health care to food security. The need for visionary moral leadership has never been more acute. Yet business schools—the institutions responsible for producing many members of the next generation of leaders—are not keeping pace.
Outside the walls of academia, the idea that maximizing shareholder wealth should be a company’s top priority is no longer sacrosanct, or even widely accepted. And although companies may not always practice what they preach, one powerful sign of this came in 2019, when 181 CEO members of the Business Roundtable—one of the leading corporate lobby groups in the United States—pledged to run their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders. Meanwhile, critics of the short-termism that stands in the way of more sustainable forms of capitalism include the leaders of some of the world’s biggest banking and investment institutions, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, the investor Warren Buffett, and Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, a giant firm with more than $9 trillion in assets under management.
